between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Kate Elliott (kateelliott), "Looking for women in historically-based fantasy worlds."

...[W]omen found ways to accomplish plenty of “things” big and small, personal and political. Maybe they did it behind a screen, or around the corner, or in the back room or in a parlor, or ran the brewery they inherited from a deceased husband, but they did all kinds of stuff that was either never noticed or was elided from historical accounts. So much of our view of what women “did” in the past is mediated through accounts written by men who either didn’t see women or were so convinced (yes, I’m looking at you, Aristotle, but you are but one among many) that women were an inferior creature that what they wrote was not only biased but selectively blind. Even now, in “modern” day, so much is mediated by our assumptions about what “doing” means and by our prejudices and misconceptions about the past.

Foz Meadows, "The Problem of R. Scott Bakker."

Or, to put it another way, Bakker writes:

-for an exclusively male audience,
-in the male gaze,
-using sexualised evil commited by men against women,
-in pornographic detail,
-in the apparent belief that rape is an inevitable part of male psychology,
-with the deliberate aim of omitting strong female characters

and doesn’t understand why feminist readers characterise him as sexist and misogynistic; or, at the absolute least, not feminist. Indeed, the idea that writing positively both for and about women is integral to being a feminist writer seems never to have occurred to him.

And interesting juxtaposition on my reading list this morning, don't you think?

Niall Harrison tallies gender percentages over at Strange Horizons for the second year in a row.

As for me, my own paid reviews break out roughly fifty-fifty. My personal reading, less so, but that's pulled off by the nonfiction gender ratios.

So, hmm, let's do better?

To be specific, riffing off Jaime's post here, concerning women authors and the recent SF Signal Mind Meld.

Borrowing her idea, I give you a list of women authors on my shelves here below.

Small prints and assorted caveats:

Authors are listed alphabetically by last name, with apparent gender of co-author noted where applicable. I've also noted where I'm aware of pseudonyms-in-use. This list does not include any non-autobiographical nonfiction or any poetry. The symbol ^ denotes non-SFF (mostly historical mysteries, with some modern mysteries/crime). The symbol $ denotes authors whose main presence on my shelves is in urban fantasy. The symbol ! denotes authors whose presence on my shelves includes works of SF.

And now, I give you.... (badda-boom-chish) The List!

List Of Authors Who Happen To Be Women Whose Books I Possess:

Aguirre, Ann !
Alexander, Alma
Andrews, Ilona * (pen-name, male-female co-author pair) $
Armstrong, Kelley $
Asaro, Catherine !
Ball, Margaret
Barr, Nevada ^
Bauer, Sabine C. !
Bear, Elizabeth !
Berg, Carol
Bickle, Laura $
Bishop, Anne
Black, Holly $
Borchardt, Alice
Bradley, Marion Zimmer !
Bray, Patricia
Brennan, Marie
Britain, Kristen
Briggs, Patricia
Brown, Rachel Manija
Bujold, Lois McMaster !
Bull, Emma
Caine, Rachel* (pen-name) $
Carey, Jacqueline
Carriger, Gail
Cashore, Kristin
Charnas, Suzy McKee !
Cherryh, C.J. !
Christensen, Elizabeth !
Clamp, Cathy (co-author with initials) $
Cochrane, Julie (co-author with male) !
Collins, Suzanne !
Cooper, Susan
Crispin, A.C. !
Cunningham, Elaine !
Czerneda, Julie E. !
De Pierres, Marianne !
Downum, Amanda
Duane, Diane !
Eddings, Leigh (co-author with male)
Emerson, Kathy Lynn ^
Evans, Linda (co-author with male) !
Fallon, Jennifer
Fletcher, Jane
Flewelling, Lynn
Fortune, Julie * (pen-name) !
Franklin, Ariana ^
Friedman, Celia S.
Furey, Maggie
Galenorn, Yasmin $
Gee, Emily
Gentle, Mary !
Gilman, Laura Anne
Goodman, Alison
Griffith, Nicola ^ !
Guon, Ellen (co-author with female)
Hall, Sarah !
Hambly, Barbara ^
Hamilton, Barbara * (pen-name of Hambly, Barbara)
Hamilton, Laurell K. $
Harris, Charlaine $
Harrison, Kim * (pen-name) $
Hendee, Barb (co-author with initials)
Hobb, Robin * (pen-name)
Hodgell, P.C.
Hoffman, Nina Kiriki
Huff, Tanya ! $
Hunter, Faith $
Hurley, Kameron !
Jacoby, Kate
Jones, J.V.
Kerr, Katherine
Kiernan, Caitlín R.
Kiernan, Celine
Kirstein, Rosemary !
Kittredge, Caitlin $
Kritzer, Naomi
Kushner, Ellen
Lackey, Mercedes
Larbalestier, Justine $
Larke, Glenda
Lee, Sharon
Lee, Sharon (co-author with male) !
Lee, Tanith
LeGuin, Ursula K. !
Lindskold, Jane
Lisle, Holly
Liu, Marjorie M. $
Lo, Malinda $
Lowachee, Karen !
Malan, Violette
Malcolm, Sally !
Marillier, Juliet
Marr, Melissa $
Mead, Richelle $
Miller, Karen
Mitchell, Syne !
Mills, K.E. * (pen-name for Miller, Karen)
Moesta, Rebecca (co-author with male) !
Monette, Sarah
Moon, Elizabeth !
Moriarty, Chris * (pen-name) !
Murphy, C.E. $
MacAlister, Katie $
McCaffrey, Anne !
McDermid, Val ^
McDonald, Sandra !
McGuire, Seanan $
McIntyre, Vonda !
McKenna, Juliet E.
McKillip, Patricia A.
McKinley, Robin
McLeod, Suzanne $
Norton, Andre
Novik, Naomi
Pierce, Tamora
Priest, Cherie $
Rardin, Jennifer $
Rawn, Melanie
Reeve, Laura E. !
Reichert, Mickey Zucker
Reichs, Kathy ^
Richardson, Kat $
Robb, J.D. * (pen-name)
Roberson, Jennifer
Robins, Madeleine E.
Robson, Justina !
Rosenblum, Mary !
Ross, Deborah J. !
Rowling, J.K.
Rusch, Kristine Kathryn !
Russ, Joanna !
Sagara, Michelle
Saintcrow, Lilith $
Sayers, Dorothy L. ^
Scott, Holly (co-author with gender-neutral) !
Scott, Manda
Sedia, Ekaterina
Shannon, Merry
Shearin, Lisa
Sherman, Delia (co-author with female)
Sherman, Josepha (co-editor with female)
Shinn, Sharon
Sinclair, Linnea !
Sizemore, Susan $
Smith, Kristine !
Smith, Sherwood
Spencer, Wen
Stevermer, Caroline
Thompson, Victoria ^
Thurman, Rob * (pen-name) $
Traviss, Karen !
Tyers, Kathy !
Vaughn, Carrie $
Viehl, S.L. * (pen-name) !
Walton, Jo
Weis, Margaret !
Wells, Martha
Wentworth, K.D. !
Wilce, Ysabeau
Williams, Liz !
Willis, Connie !
Wood, Suzanne !
Wrede, Patricia C.
Wurts, Janny

---

That's 165 names, folks. Perhaps slightly fewer discrete persons, but not by much. Let's call it 160 individuals. My personal library runs to something like 1400 volumes - yep, I'm a hoarder - and I'd say it's at least 60% female-identified.

If I've got time, I'll run through the male names tomorrow and run a numbers comparison.

So, here's a thought I had while trudging through my reams of notes and books by people you've never heard of: an academic history book is like science fiction.

No, really. It is.

I assume anyone reading this journal has cracked the spine of a history book more than once. Probably, you're aware of the distinctions between the ones directed at a scholarly audience, and the ones directed more broadly. Popular (or introductory: although the handful of Actual Textbooks I have had the misfortune to encounter have all been written in the most graceless style and prose) books are careful not to give you more information than you can expect to digest: they simplify, sometimes appallingly, and very often they fail to engage with the fundamental arguments that inform modern scholarship at anything more than the most superficial level.

Books for a scholarly audience, on the other hand…

Not so very long ago, I read Marcus Rediker's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a history of the maritime world between 1700 and 1750. It's a very solid work of history, but I came to it cold, with no background in the area, and found myself in the midst of an ongoing conversation which was clearly engaging not only with its subject, but with other work done in the field, and so I feel damn sure that I lost half of what that book was saying through not being able to follow the references.

A couple of days ago, I was reading a chapter from - oh, it must have been The Villages of Roman Britain, a tiny wee book, no more than fifty pages long. But it assumed a level of knowledge and engagement in the conversation - familiarity with, at least, Wacher's work on the towns and "small towns" of Roman Britain, and the Iron Age background, and how that informs scholarly discussion of villages and agriculture and "villas", and why the terms in inverted commas are in inverted commas. And I had sufficient level of knowledge to follow the conversation, if not, quite, to make my own points.

And so it occurred to me that history is like science fiction. There are books that throw you in the deep end, to sink or to swim, to follow a bewildering array of connections and references and terms and characters, concerned with a world that is entirely alien. To follow academic history in its native environment requires many of the same reading protocols one uses to infer sense and meaning in the background of a science fiction or fantasy novel: the ability to fill in the gaps with inference and extrapolation; to read meaning into widely-scattered signs and symbols, and crack one's brain open to attempt to understand alien ways of looking at the world.

And there are books that downplay the strangeness, and go steadily forward, neither inspired nor disappointing, but lacking a certain depth and scope.

So this is the extent of my thought. Yours?

Because I am too sleepy to turn this into a post with actual paragraphs:

hawkwing_lb (23:04:19): Possibly this is a thought brought on by the last vestiges of cold medicine.
hawkwing_lb (23:04:57): but it occurs to me that there are many alien worlds or world-experiences very close at hand.
stillnotbored (23:05:30): there are indeed
hawkwing_lb (23:06:02): and for all the vaunted sensawunda of science fiction, most of it is very conservative when dealing with 'alienness,' and even more conservative in dealing with human people.
cristalia (23:07:38): That sounds like a thought worth chasing.
stillnotbored(23:07:50): it does
hawkwing_lb (23:08:02): I mean, I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the recent science fiction novels I've read where people are less strange to me than the Nigerian immigrants who have church service in the local community centre of a Sunday.
tanaise (23:09:10): Liz, that's basically why I always think of my stuff as SF.
tanaise (23:09:36): because it's not this culture, so it is 'the other' and SF is about 'the other'
hawkwing_lb (23:10:18): (I mean, their experience of life is different to mine in ways I can hardly begin to imagine. For starters, they come from somewhere warm. And the congregation sings in church, all of them, every Sunday)
tanaise (23:11:09): Yeah. Sociological SF is part of the sf that gets most overlooked , I notice.
hawkwinglb (23:11:13): or to pick another example, I have read science fiction novels where the people were less strange to me than some of the people I went to school with
stillnotbored (23:11:51): you should chase that for sure
hawkwing_lb (23:12:04): (and certainly less strange to me than my good friend from Tallaght whose best friends all go to art school.)
hawkwing_lb (23:12:55): this is as far as my chasing goes, tonight.

So, does anyone have any thoughts on this? Because I'm fairly sure I'm not imagining the lack of strangeness in SF, or at least, the SF I've read recently.